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openSUSE Has A Problem, Is Seeking New Direction

06-14-2012, 06:50 AM

Phoronix: openSUSE Has A Problem, Is Seeking New Direction

Stephan Kulow, the release manager for openSUSE, has publicly acknowledged this morning that this community distribution to SUSE has found itself in a problem and they're now looking to the community to seek out a fundamentally new direction for this Linux distribution...

I think moving to rolling-release model is the best solution to all problems.

Yes!

Waiting 6+ months for a new release to get software updated sucks.
This is the days of lightspeed Internet where you need to keep on innovating and developing or you become irrelevant.
6 months in the computer industry is a very long time. Too long time.

I want my software updates now.
I want GIMP 2.8 now, not in 6 months when Ubuntu 12.10 is out.

Comment

Rolling releases will be great to end users, but a complete pain in the ass for the developers. When the ABI or API for a shared library like libPNG changes, EVERYTHING that directly depends on it has to get updated as well. If the developers don't catch a broken package due to changes in the shared library, they're going to have tons of angry users breathing down their neck. It's much easier for developers to push back shared library changes to the next release so they have more time for testing.

Distributions like Gentoo or Arch don't have to worry about this because it's a community, not a company that has to (absolutely) worry about keeping everything stable. Further more, Gentoo has tools like revdep-rebuild and python-updater that can detect broken packages and Python libraries and will do its best to automagically fix them for you, taking the work off the developers. I don't know if other communities or companies use tools like this, it'd be nice to know how they handle broken packages.

Comment

Really - I'm too fed up with installing OS's. I run some Gentoo boxes for years now and I never had to wipe anything or do scary release updates - and always get fresh and useless new features. Of course there are sometimes minor incompatibilities with updates, but those small ones are usually easier to solve than having more or major ones on larger upgrades.

Comment

Waiting 6+ months for a new release to get software updated sucks.
This is the days of lightspeed Internet where you need to keep on innovating and developing or you become irrelevant.
6 months in the computer industry is a very long time. Too long time.

I want my software updates now.
I want GIMP 2.8 now, not in 6 months when Ubuntu 12.10 is out.

6 month release-cycles basically suck, and it's one of the (many) reasons, i use a rolling-release.

Out of curiosity, though - if you want gimp-2.8, isn't there a PPA in Ubuntu for that? and even if there wasn't, you do know you could build Gimp yourself, right?

I build Gimp from the GIT branch, every few weeks. So most of the features in 2.8 (including 'single-window-mode') i've been using for quite some time now. I suspect though, someone probably is packaging 2.8 in a PPA (along with a newer version of BABL and GEGL, as gimp would require them).

cheerz

Comment

But OpenSUSE already has a rolling release version - it's called Tumbleweed and works more or less ok, there's only a small catch... Rolling means new kernel and xorg versions all the time. Which means you won't necessarily be compatible properietary driver versions, especially GPU drivers, as amd and nvidia don't want to keep up with the kernel. So, yeah... ;-)

Either way I'm really confident in the dev team, seeing as they manage all this time to keep the whole OpenSUSE distro up to date and stable at the same time.